Merry Christmas, Mr Logan!
by summerlinde
Summary: Logan tries to get out of a trip to the mall by telling a small group of students stories about his many Christmasses. Fluff ensues.


**I'm not sure if this actually fits with the backstory we get in the series or not, and I _know_ it doesn't fit with comicverse, but I wrote it anyway. Fluff!**

* * *

It was three days before Christmas and Logan wanted absolutely nothing to do with the outside world. He hated this time of year. He hated the way everything was always crowded and people were cranky and drivers drove badly. He hated the way even a trip to the convenience store for a six-pack became an ordeal with holiday shoppers running out of gas, frantic to get to the next store like they thought the perfect present was going to vanish if they didn't find it _right now_. He hated the way the billion cheesy Christmas movies on TV were full of product placement and commercials and made the single teenage girls at the mansion act lonely and desperate. He hated the mile-long Christmas lists the kids wrote for each other, everything spelled out in detail like if it wasn't exactly right, they didn't want it anymore.

This had been going on long enough, and Logan was done. He'd face the world again come Christmas Eve. Late Christmas Eve. After all the stores were closed and everyone had settled in for the annual watching of _It's a Wonderful Life_. He liked _It's a Wonderful Life_ more than he necessarily wanted to admit, and it was one of the few "modern" traditions he still liked.

Suddenly, there was a knock at his door. "No!" he shouted through it.

Jubilee's voice answered back, "But you don't even know what we were going to ask yet!"

Logan glared at the door. "The answer's no, Sparky."

Kitty stepped through the closed door, but Logan had been half expecting that. "But Mr. Logan, we have to go to the mall! We haven't bought Storm's present yet! And anyway, we'd drive _ourselves_ if we _could_!"

There was a whisper on the other side of the door that he probably wasn't meant to hear. "We could do it anyway, you know. I might not have a license, but I can _definitely _get us there without getting caught." Rogue. Logan groaned. He wouldn't put it past her to do it, and driving without a driver's license was one of those things he wasn't supposed to encourage.

"You know," he commented, "There _was _Christmas before there were malls. You girls are creative. Can't you make her something?" He realized he sounded whiny, but pretended not to notice. Whining was for teenagers. Logan was just . . . doing something kind of like whining. . .

"But we don't have enough time!" Jubes explained from the other side of the door.

Logan grunted, then opened the door to let the other girls in. If they were going to have this conversation anyway, they might as well not have it through the door. "What matters is, it's Christmas," he said. "I'm sure anything you come up with will be fine. One of my best Christmasses was just trading rations and cigarettes with the other soldiers." What he didn't mention was that they'd been the enemy's soldiers in WWI, in what had felt like a true moment of peace. Christmas had never seemed more important before or since.

As though she sensed a story, Kitty plopped down on the end of his bed, looking up at him with wide, childlike eyes, and asked, "What war was that? Was it the Vietnam War?" He wasn't sure he felt like telling this story. He wasn't sure he could get away with not telling it. But he could try.

"Earlier than that," he said evasively.

"The Korean War, then?"

"World War II?"

"The Civil War?"

Logan sighed as all three girls kept guessing. This sounded like not getting away with not telling them. "World War I. 1914. The Christmas Truce. You can look it up on Wikipedia," he answered gruffly. Now all three of them were sitting on the end of his bed, looking as young and innocent as possible. Eyelashes fluttered. Eyes pleaded. He gave in.

Sitting down in his armchair, he started the story with a deep sigh. "The war had just started and we'd all thought at the beginning that we were sure to make it home for Christmas, but the longer we spent in the trenches, the more obvious it got that we weren't getting anywhere fast and we sure as heck weren't going to make it home for the holidays. I was fighting on the side of the British, and I wasn't sure I really had a home to go to anyway, but most of the guys were pretty upset. . ."

Once he'd gotten started, the storytelling came surprisingly easy. He supposed that was what he got for allowing himself to become a history teacher, of all things. He told them about how he'd been in one of the more peaceful stretches of trench in the early days, and about how they'd come out of their trenches on Christmas Day to have a big joint burial service with the British and the Germans, how they'd traded bits and pieces from their rations back and forth as gifts, how they'd cobbled together a language of simple English and German words that everyone knew to talk to each other, how they'd sung carols in two languages at once and how he'd learned all the German words to "Oh Tannanbaum."

The girls asked him to sing it. He said no. They asked for another story, and when the question sounded like one out of their history class, he gave in and told another one.

Somewhere between the story of his WWII Christmas at the USO (the cleaned up version, because his audience was made up of 15 and 16-year-old girls) and the story of his first Christmas in Vietnam, he realized that as long as he was talking, they weren't begging him to drive them to the mall and maybe if he could keep it up, they would forget entirely. He kept talking, giving in to the old soldier inside that always wanted to tell his war stories even when the rest of him didn't.

Eventually, war stories made way for peace stories as he told them about Canadian and American Christmasses across the decades. They seemed deeply captivated by his stories about Christmas in 1920's Harlem, Christmas in 1960's Paris between Korea and Vietnam, Christmas back home in Canada in the 1930's when the depression hit hard on both sides of the 49th parallel, and, when he really lost control of himself, stories about Christmas as a child more than a century ago.

When the bell rang to call them to dinner, he came back to himself and realized he'd never intended to tell them those last stories. He'd never meant to think about his childhood at all. As they walked to dinner, Kitty commented, "It sounds nice, Mr. Logan. I think a simple Christmas would be fun. Maybe next year?" Wheels started turning before he realized he was being ridiculous. He couldn't take over the entire holiday as a history project. And even if he did, he couldn't change the steady flow of time, moving forward. He pushed the idea out of his mind.

After dinner, he found himself dragged, somehow, to the mall, in spite of all his best efforts. He dropped the girls off, fighting the perpetual Christmastime urge to jump out of his car and slash everyone else's tires so they would stop driving badly. He could weave through a world of deserted car corpses happily if it meant no more frazzled holiday drivers changing lanes every few feet and driving under the speed limit as they looked for stores they couldn't find.

His mood wasn't much better when he picked the girls up as the stores started closing, in spite of the time in between, spent in the bar.

He thought the problem might be the fact that the Christmas music piped into the place had been entirely secular and silly, the sort of things he hated. (He'd hated "Santa Baby" ever since Eartha Kitt recorded it for the first time in 1953, and most versions weren't even as good as hers, but that wasn't as bad as it had gotten later; there weren't even words to describe how much he hated John Lennon's "Happy Xmas," for a thousand different reasons, not least the fact that he hated the man in general.)

The problem had probably been compounded by the commercials running non-stop on the TV, showing men buying their girlfriends and wives cars and expensive jewelry. And the fact that the people around him had been whining about needing a beer to get them through their shopping. And the fact that he couldn't actually get drunk off of beer because his metabolism was too fast. That reminded him of his old friend Steve. Steve would hate Christmas like this, too. Good thing Steve was frozen. Logan briefly wished he were frozen, too, and he didn't have to deal with this whole holiday mess.

When the girls got back in the car, humming with excitement about how much their friends back at the mansion were sure to love their presents, he felt less inclined to freeze himself for a couple of decades and hope things got better. At least their focus was close to the right place - the people they cared about, not the stuff they were getting. It was a little bit on the stuff, too, but they were good kids, and at least they were happy.

* * *

On Christmas morning, he found a stocking he hadn't hung hanging from the mantel with his name on it. Jubilee appeared at his elbow, almost beside herself with excitement as she asked, "Aren't you gonna see what's in it?"

Rogue and Kitty were watching him from across the room, one more subtly than the other (he really _did_ like Rogue), so he walked to the mantel, trying not to let them onto the fact that he was actually more excited about his stocking than he'd been about anything for quite a while. He'd been pretending not to be into Christmas at all, but he supposed after their talk a few days ago, at least those three knew better.

"Alright. Tell your cohorts I'm opening my stocking." Jubilee didn't have to say a thing - the other two wove their way over to him, through the crowd of kids digging into their own stockings, the moment he had his hands on the thing.

Inside, he found a package of cigarettes (he had no idea how they'd gotten their hands on them and he wasn't sure if he wanted to know or not, but he was pretty sure he was going to have to disapprove either way), an orange, a CD of Louis Armstrong's Christmas music, a Korean apple-pear, and a dozen other little whatnots out of the stories he'd told them - bobbi pins, like the ones the USO girls had used to pin the rip in his shirt closed after he got into a bar fight, a couple of different old-fashioned candies in specialty packaging, and a handful of cracker-jack-box jokes, because apparently they hadn't understood that the "prize" in a box of cracker jacks had been considerably different when the company started out.

He wasn't sure what to say, so he didn't.

Rogue laughed and wrapped her arms around him in a sudden hug. "We do listen sometimes, you know. When you talk." He hugged her back and then the other girls wanted in, too, and then it was all bear hugs and for the first time in a couple of years, it really felt like Christmas. He had that quavery feeling in his throat that always meant the holiday was going right. It was beautiful.

"Thank you, girls," he said, keeping careful control over his voice, "Merry Christmas."


End file.
